


Z Minus

by eye_of_a_cat



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: F/M, Shadows - Freeform, Spoilers for Episode: s03e22 Z'ha'dum, complicated marriage situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14779490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eye_of_a_cat/pseuds/eye_of_a_cat
Summary: Shadows will always give you what you want, in the end.





	Z Minus

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LiveJournal in 2006.

It's the light she sees first. White-cold, and spreading over them like fire, it doesn't belong in a place like this. She watches it turn the city's soft shadows into blades of light and dark as John looks back, looks away, stares down into the chasm ahead of him; it's glowing on his skin as it bleaches hers, and still she can't place it, still she can't understand what it means. Not until the dome above them shatters, and he falls.  
  
Eight seconds before, she told him she was dead. No revelation here - he'd told Morden and Justin already, as certain as though it was his to decide. Which it was, after all. Put aside the body that still walks and speaks and breathes, the mind that remembers every last thing, because he knew all that already and still he let her go for the sake of two scars on her neck and something invisible in her eyes. His wife was dead. So why not let him hear it in her own voice?  
  
(Not that he couldn't have turned back, even then. Not that she wouldn't have loved him. No-one ever said he didn't have a choice.)  
  
Ten hours before was the White Star, with a sickly Vorlon light that pulsed and ached behind her eyes. Morden warned her she'd feel it, but not like this; she wanted to scream, to tear the damn ship apart with her hands, pulling through wires and shattering metal until it let her be. But he couldn't see it, and even if she showed him everything she'd been shown - wars and angels and burning ships, Earth's sunlight glinting off Minbari armour and his hands on someone else's skin - he wouldn't understand.  
  
Ten hours before he'd fallen where she couldn't reach, and that ship came down in fire to kill anything left, he kissed his own tears from her face and told her he'd missed her so much that some nights he couldn't breathe. Ten hours before she'd lost him, she curled around him like wires, hands and arms and fingers splayed out over bare skin, and felt the traces of everything he'd done and everything he'd done it for scattered over his body like that pale, aching light.  
  
"I meant it," he'd said. "What I said before - about you, about what I'd have done -"  
  
"I know," she'd said, and heard anyway what he wouldn't have told her. Anything, anything that wasn't this Shadow-wife come back to tear apart everything he believed with every breath she still took. Anything, but not this.  
  
Three days before, he'd pushed her away. Not hard, not angry, just one hand on her shoulder holding her apart from him. "Did they hurt you? Will they?"  
  
"No," she'd told him. "They're not what you think."  
  
But it wasn't his thoughts alone. Vorlons and Minbari, civil wars on Earth, that old, stubborn line about always finishing fights you didn't start - they knew him, and they knew him well enough to make him wish, just for a moment, that she'd said otherwise.  
  
So there was a choice, at the end. His, not hers; she'd already chosen cities older than myths, ships that held her and sang to her, more than she could ever describe. But she couldn't choose for him, in that moment before she spoke, when he still stood scared and injured between her and a fall into nothing. She could have given him freedom, but she knew now that he'd never have asked. All he wanted - more than her, more than life - was for the woman walking towards him to not be his Anna.  
  
And she could give him that.


End file.
